-Pa, how do you get the coverin’ disks to hit the furrow?
-They jest do, son.
-But you never look, pa.
-Keep your eyes on the horizon, boy. Sound advice always.
-But how do you know?
-Waste of time to tend that which tends itself, son. Got to trust to God and yourself. Who else you gonna trust, exactly?
-Did you learn what goes on behind you?
-Same as you, son, riding and asking a lot of damn fool questions. My pa said that if the nattering ever stopped in his wake, he’d know enough to turn the rig back towards the house and arrange a funeral. Nothing else would shut my piehole.
-You’ve gone quiet now, pa.
-What a man says has meaning, son. Gotta choose your words careful. Can’t get two drinks in you and start a ruckus with a neighbor you might need someday. Makes a man pick through his words like picking through the taters looking for eyes. Don’t pay to plant them if the seed ain’t there, or the ground is like to be barren. Children can talk as they like.
-I’m a man now, pa.
-Shaving don’t make a man, son. You’ll go quiet in your turn. Don’t rush it. Talk to that girl, the one from away, at the Grange Hall fetes a bit first. Or you’ll never get anyone to hound you from the back of the tractor for your own. And sakes; keep your prayer handles between the hoppers or you’ll muck up the line of the pickers and the furrow opener. I can feel it.
I’ve never had a job that I can recall that was pure art. Most of my handwork has been based off architecture, and that inhabits a shadow world between art and utility. The furniture business is like that, too. Am I trying to make functional things in an visually interesting way, or visually interesting things that are functional? I don’t know.
I take things that I just made and I beat them with chains, among other abominations. It’s an odd sensation, especially the first time you do it. The purpose is to mimic a real kind of use. It’s not real, exactly, but it’s the representation of a kind of reality. It’s as if you’re trying to capture a point in time, and an artist can never really be in a moment in time. It’s gone by and he tries to recreate it, or it’s in the future and he’s trying to predict it. And he’s editing that moment in time, to include what is necessary to express the feeling about the subject that is desired. Even a photographer does this, because what he leaves out is as important as what is left in, and how things are composed is still subject to the subjective.
People need a hook to hang me on in their intellectual cupboard, and search for one from time to time. I’ve had people box the compass of comparison from Norm to Richard Brautigan. None of them ever seem to fit, at least to me.
The picture at the top is a painting called Safeway Interior, by an artist named Ralph Goings, from 1974.
Why do I make a brand new table and try to make it look old? I don’t know. To capture something. Writing fiction is like that, too, but I’d have a deuce of a time explaining how an end table and Huckleberry Finn are blood brothers to anyone not living in my cobwebbed mind.
Why does Ralph Goings paint a picture you mistook for a photograph of a mundane thing? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s somehow similar. He’s just better at his job than I am at mine.
Psst. You didn’t hear this from me, but if you were to go to this page right here, and you were to select Woman’s World Special Ten Finger Stepper from the first drop down list, customize your item to your heart’s content from the colors and finishes dropdown lists, then type sippicanblog into the coupon code box, you’d get 50% off on your purchase of a Sippican Cottage Furniture Super Ten Fingers Stepper.
$24.99? That’s twenty-five soul-stirring, headspinning, epiphany-producing, wallet-gorging bucks off the regular price, which is too damn cheap in the first place. And if enough people purchase one, we can start feeding our younger son regularly again. After we fetch him off the ice floe, of course.
I sat for a long moment at the end of my little boy’s bed last night. It struck me how much of the stuff he truly treasures is little more than trash. He struck me quite a bit, too, with many of the items he keeps at hand.
It’s all marvelously bright and tasteless and kinda shoddy. It never was much, and now it’s all mostly busted up and in a sort of exquisitely arranged jumble. He picks through it all in an exact manner, each thing his friend and companion. They talk to him, and he talks to them.
I don’t think it would be possible to arrange his things beforehand. You could not go to a store and pick them out. The things he cannot live without are usually some off-handedly chosen present from someone who barely knows him, if they know him at all. How would you know he’d want to play with a two inch tall Spiderman figure that has lost his lower body? Forty people, me included, gave him stuffed animals when he was born, and out of all of them he chose a Winnie The Pooh and chewed its ear off, a little at a time, while he was falling asleep. His mother had to perform a radical earectomy on the little little bruin, and our son just sort of placed the spot where the ear used to be near his mouth and carried on falling asleep with it. The other thirty nine still have tags on them.
In a thousand years, I could never part with that ratty doll. My boy will lose interest in it altogether, as his older brother did with the things of his infancy. Any stranger would just see a mangled, dirty ball of stuffing and give it the heave-ho.
I watch the shelter shows. It’s out of a sense of duty. It’s my business, and I need to understand the zeitgeist.
I yell at the television. I literally yell at the television. That is a warning sign, like purchasing leather pants. I need to tilt at this windmill, or shut up.
It’s a huge mistake for advice about housing to devolve to the unholy troika of realtors, hamhanded interior decorators, and building material shills.
The realtors really get me. If you get your advice about the liveability of your house from a realtor, you’re plain nuts. They are clerks of a very particular kind. It’s like asking your accountant for dating tips. They’re unlikely to give you any advice other than save your receipts. After what’s happened in the last two years to the bank accounts of homeowners following the cult of the realtor, I’m amazed they’re not shunned liked lepers at this point. But no, they’re experts about housing, and I’m yelling at the television.
How did interior decoration get thrust front and center in house design? Not interior design, interior decoration. Interior decoration is a proud profession, but it’s the tail that wags the sticks and bricks dog now. Shelter shows are fascinated with soft goods. The soft goods move with the homeowner. A motley assortment of people come and place pillows around your house and then you sell it. Who is taken in by staging of real estate at this point? People that listen to realtors, I guess. It’s the housing version of used car dealers putting sawdust in transmissions near death to quiet the grinding while the sucker takes the car for a test drive. I was so busy looking at the throw pillows I didn’t notice the fish store dumpster under the bedroom window, dear.
You don’t have time to read the 140,000 words I could dump on you like mulch right now about this topic, so let me save us all some time, and just point out the weasel words you should be on the lookout for. There’s a hearty handful of them, and if you spot any one of them being used in any context on a shelter show, I hereby grant you dispensation to ignore every other word emitted from the mouth of the offender, about everything, forevermore. Here’s one that’ s fresh in my mind:
Updating.
They rattle this one off about everything. After a while, the poor prospective homebuyers start saying it if the realtor says it a few times, like a jerk at work that whistles The Candy Man to see how many people he can infect with it.
What everyone is referring to is having a Home Depot flyer explode inside the house. If you tear out the crap these same brigands told the previous owners to install three years ago, and replace it with stuff they’ll be telling you to rip out two years hence, you’re “updating.” Put in bamboo floors, stainless steel appliances, granite coutertops, and glass subway tile, and your house will be state of the art! At least until next season.
Updating used to means something. People would take out their 50 amp service and put in a 200 amp that a modern family needed to run air conditioning and two 50 watt light bulbs at the same time. Hot water heaters that had enough capacity to actually fill the tub would be installed. The kitchen would have enough convenience outlets for all the appliances. Services to the house like fiber optic lines would be installed, or existing lines buried. People would add a bathroom, not fart around endlessly with the appearance of the existing one. Stuff like that.
Tile, wood flooring, a lot of woodwork, and many other items used to be considered more or less permanent installations. A house has a useful life measured in hundreds of years. If it’s not useful, it’s still going to be around for a very long time, a blot on the landscape and a waste of the owner’s money.
Run from the updaters. Try this instead: put something in or on your house that another person — a stranger — would hesitate before they would tear it out or cover it up.
Now up the ante. The aforementioned stranger is living there after you’re dead, and you didn’t die young.
Month: May 2009
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
-Pa, how do you get the coverin’ disks to hit the furrow?
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